CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT,
THE HOUSE/RESTAURANT
IN YAMAGUCHI UNDER
CONSTRUCTION; A CONCRETE
MODEL OF THE PROJECT;
THE CONSTRUCTION SITE,
ONCE THE EARTH HAD
BEEN DUG FROM AROUND
THE CONCRETE STALACTITES;
STUDIES OF THE PILLARSa kindergarten with cloud-shaped walls in Atsugi; and
a stunning open-plan, glass-wrapped workshop at the
Kanagawa Institute of Technology. But what he is
perhaps best known for so far is his work on pavilions,
installations and temporary exhibitions.
For Ishigami, though, all of his projects are pure
architecture. ‘I don’t think it is so important to ask
whether something is architecture or not,’ he says,
adding that he sees even models as important
creations in their own right: ‘Architects use models
to imagine spaces and, in that sense, I believe the
models themselves should be considered architecture.’
The studio makes regular use of models in its design
development, but there is no set formula for the
process. ‘Sometimes I start with a drawing, sometimes
with a model. In the case of the House/Restaurant in
Yamaguchi, it was the construction process that was
the starting point.’
The construction of the Yamaguchi project is,
to put it mildly, rather unique. The client requested
a cave-like space where he could use part of the
building as a restaurant and part of it as his private
residence. Ishigami came up with the idea to create
a series of holes in the ground, pour concrete into these
and then dig out the spaces between the resulting
concrete stalactites – and voilà! What you end up with
is an almost natural-looking cave that only needs to be
fitted with carefully sized windows and doors in order
to create an enticing interior. The original idea was
to clean the poured concrete columns, but after they
started digging around these, Ishigami was attractedto the earthy quality of the surface, the result of soil
sticking to the poured concrete. ‘I thought, this is very
similar to traditional Japanese earthen walls, why don’t
we keep it like this,’ he recalls.
Ishigami likes these small accidents and unexpected
elements of the trade; the architect also likes to find
inspiration in the natural world and the existing
landscape, assembling disparate found objects into new
compositions that add meaning and worth to often
mundane things. This is apparent in his project in
Akita, for which he has designed homes for the elderly
made up of parts of homes scheduled for demolition,
sourced from across the country; or his large Art Biotop
garden project in Nasu, where he carefully selected
and replanted 300 trees from an adjacent plot.
Ishigami is passionate about his work and is
sure that a change is coming that will liberate
architecture from ‘just’ being about designing and
constructing buildings. ‘I don’t think about style in
my architecture,’ he says. ‘I want to free myself and
propose what is right for a certain project at a certain
location.’ There is a true curiosity and passion for
experimentation in Ishigami’s work, and with
upcoming projects including a floating cloud-shaped
House of Peace in Denmark, a monumental silver arch
in Sydney, and further commissions in Japan and
China, the next couple of years might just set him
and his architecture free. ∂
‘Junya Ishigami: Freeing Architecture’, 30 March –
10 June 2018, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain,
Paris, fondationcartier.com, jnyi.jp Construction site photography: Satoru EmotoArchitecture
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